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Scaling Your Business Without Losing Your Soul (ft. Ryan Deiss) · CrossPolitic Show

• Hey all welcome to CrossPolitik one on one with the water boy it's good to be with you and man so many of you missed this but last week my business makers network was had our first national conference in Dallas, Texas. Businessmakers.network is the website if you guys want to follow what we're doing over there and join the network and what we're doing. We just has a great conference, great speakers in Dallas and one of the things I really appreciate about the conference is actually it was all geared towards business leaders and so that unique kind of niche of an audience actually was a lot of fun to be around and everything something I didn't quite expect but was a real fun value to me and everything so but the reason why I bring that up also is because I have one of our speakers who spoke with the conference Ryan Dice coming on our show today to talk about scaling businesses and marketing so very excited to have Ryan on have a conversation with him actually I wish I would have done this conversation with him at the conference he spoke and that's all he did and he didn't get to do a fireside chat with me but that's okay we can do it on this show on one on one for you guys today so about before I get there I got to tell you guys about our fight laugh feast conference I know you know it's coming up in October are you ready that's the question are you ready for the fight laugh feast conference this year we're going to be in Franklin Franklin the factory in Franklin and the topic is holy words just words holy words and and the tagline is just words the crusades and the Christian life such an important topic and it seems to get more important is the year goes along with all the words and stuff going on with Iran and Ukraine and stuff like that so I really hope you guys are challenged by that topic as usual this isn't your typical conference we're attacking the questions others won't touch which is true what descriptions actually teach and actually say about war where the crusades just how do we live faithfully as Christians in a world hostile to the truth what is personal holiness have to do with how we think about war and so forth we're kicking things off Thursday night with bearing psalms then dividing into a couple days of fearless talks from our speakers including pastor Doug Wilson pastor Joe Rigny pastor Sumpter long a doctor Ben Merkel pastor longshore pastor George Grant and man more I'm very excited about this join thousands of us in the Franklin area in the Franklin factory as we sing psalms as we fellowship and as we kind of just kick some things around for the glory of God fight laugh feast October 1st second and third it's literally the same week as C. R. E. C. council in the Nashville area so register at fight laugh feast calm we can't wait to see you guys there I have you guys been following red balloon business owners is your company struggling to grow what if I told you that the right employee could grow your business by 5 10 or 25% actually talk about this with our guests a little bit you could be crazy not to take that deal right that's exactly what red balloon recruiters offers their personalized source and screen process connects you with top talent increasing revenue reducing costs visit red balloon dot work today tell him cross Paul to sent you and transform your hiring today so to get to my guests so I'm so excited to have a conversation with Ryan dyes Ryan dyes is a best selling author entrepreneur and one of america's leading voices in digital marketing he's the co founder and CEO of digital marketer and managing partner at rival brands with a portfolio exceeding 200 million in annual revenue creator of the customer value optimization framework and host of the traffic and conversation summit Ryan writes and speaks on scaling businesses without losing your soul amen and he lives in austin texas which you guys know as home of salt like barbecue with his wife and four children Ryan thank you for coming out cross Paul to go on on one yeah man thanks for having me so you've been it sounds like you kind of told your story a little bit on stage at the conference and you know like all entrepreneurs have had your ups and downs in in the business world and after kind of going through a bunch of struggles it seems like you're now in a position you seem like you got kind of a couple businesses going on maybe just kind of kind of for our listeners describe currently what you're doing and the businesses you're managing just kind of give us a little context of of where you're at now sure so today it's kind of the perfect embodiment of my entrepreneurial ADHD we've got about 17 companies in the portfolio I am a minority owner in most of them and that is by design I've been starting businesses scaling businesses selling businesses since I was 19 years old I'm 45 now now tired and so the the phase that I'm in right now is more how do I work with partner with operators who really are sort of stuck in that messy middle typically shows up between 2 million and 8 million it's when you have all the complexities of an eight figure business with the revenue of a seven figure business to support them so we'll partner with them invest in them and look to kind of get them through that no man's land and maybe scale with them maybe help them exit but that's basically the business today kind of my main core operating company is called the scalable company and it's essentially a consulting and services business but really it's just a front for kind of our our own little brand of private equity so that's that's kind of what we're doing today that's super helpful so you'll basically your niche is really finding those companies that are I've worked for those companies for that two to eight million dollar category you'll help them kind of break through that that ceiling or that those challenges and then you'll either maintain them or sell them off or sell maybe maybe sell it back to themselves after you kind of get them through that that area yeah I mean the the worst place that I've ever been in business is like five or six million in revenue it's just awful I and I've done this a number of times and in my experience as a business owner you're going to personally make more money keep more money when you're business to doing a million or two million and then we say okay let's scale let's do this thing and we assume that as we scale things will just get better that will just make more money and that's not what happens in the middle of that range you wind up looking around and thinking if the company's making more money why am I making less you're looking around thinking where did all these people come from and what the heck do they do because they don't seem like they're doing any actual work that matters it just chaos and complexity starts to rain and this is what stalls out a lot of businesses what causes founders to burn out and a lot of business owners I know this was me too kind of decide at this point that maybe they don't have what it takes to scale their business to the next level one of things that I absolutely believe is that business owners should be able to run their business stay at the helm for as long as they want to so I love business owners love helping see and see them succeed and so yeah if we can be a part of that then it's it's a joy yeah that's that's great are you more like what are some of the what are those 17 companies made up of are they like you know kind of blue collar all the way to tech you know what's kind of the make up it's a lot of business services because that's kind of who we know and it's what it's what we do so we've got entity formation companies you know counting financial related companies but then there's just some weird ones I mean there's a there's a business in our portfolio that they do guitar lessons online and you know we're working with a company that does benefit type type things so right now it's all over the place if I were doing it again I would probably be a little bit more strategic and trying to pick businesses that we can you know combine and roll up and and we're we're working towards that I mean we've got a number of companies there are a large company that's in the real estate space real estate brokerage and that's a that's a roll up so rolling up other businesses into it but we actually don't do a ton in our portfolio in home services I love home services business businesses but they've been so kind of gobbled up and overvalued by private equity that it's a little bit tough to find any decent deals there so I'm not opposed to it we'd like to add some of those to our portfolio same with the more technical like high tech type businesses software companies you know prior to recently they were just so insanely overvalued that we really couldn't do a lot of deals there now with AI coming on board they're getting heavily disrupted so are kind of ideal business that we're looking to work with it's less in industry and it's more a stage and it's more kind of a psychographic of where the business owner is for us we want to work with a company that's been flat or a little bit down for the last three years but they're succeeding in spite of themselves right like they got a great product people like them customers and clients stay they're just maybe not that great at marketing and promoting themselves at scale or at building a business operation that can scale yeah I read this last year I read a book called I'm built then by I'm pretty pretty good yeah and one of the things that you know honestly to me like the first four chapters or whatever the most helpful to me because then he goes into I'm talking about different ways and in practical ways of you know buying or structuring business and stuff which was still helpful but like his point about baby boomers retiring you know something like he estimated something like 10,000 a day coming up and then all those baby boomers own businesses and they don't have maybe children to pass them down to or whatever that there's just a lot of going to be a lot of demand or the sale of businesses coming from baby boomers and and then and then you kind of also add to that that a lot of the baby boomers haven't really integrated technology efficiently into their processes and so there's a there's really some efficiency opportunities buying these businesses integrating fish efficiency opportunities and they're increasing the revenue through those efficiency opportunities not even talking about the new revenue growth opportunities from that is that part of your play is kind of looking at that yeah a lot of the businesses that we work with they are people who are looking at retiring and passing it on to the next generation but the bulk of who we're working with are active business owners who want to stay active they want to keep running the business they're just burnt out and so I do believe that there is an opportunity with a lot of these so if you're if you're more on the acquisition side and you're looking to get into business acquiring a business can be a good way to do that what a lot of people don't realize is that a bad business is still a bad business even if it's doing some revenue and and a lot of these businesses the reason they haven't been sold is because it's just not very good businesses so if you don't have experiences an operator there's a lot of people out there who are raising money and they want to Harvard and you know Harvard Business School so they were able to raise a search fund and go in there they're trying to buy you know all these plumbing HVAC companies and they're realizing you know you can't run a business from a spreadsheet yeah that's right like you actually have to know how to operate a business so I think a lot of people approach businesses like they would approach real estate investing whereas pretty much all of us have at least lived in a house we know how house works not all this know how business works so I'd be pretty I would caution somebody if you don't have any experience whatsoever in business from just assuming that you can go in and run a business merely because it's there especially one that's kind of caught in that funky middle stage oftentimes you'd be better off starting it from scratch than acquiring somebody else's mangled messed up junk especially if they don't want to hang around and run it on Tuesday the business makers conference David Rees spoke you weren't there yet for this but he gave him that effort that I really identify with and I think it comes in the plays you think about like scaling your business the chaos of that two to eight million dollar time as as you try to push through that and he said that a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners have you know let's say maybe five pools that they need to fill and then a hundred buckets that they need to fill to fill the five pools and so you're constantly trying to sort through you know which buckets do I fill how much do I fill this bucket do I use this bucket do I you know and then I need to fill the five pools using these hundred buckets and and what that means is you're in some sense like you might have heard Matt Reynolds you might have heard Matt Reynolds talking about undoing urgency yeah and if you're just constantly running around you know putting out fires well you know you aren't going to make much progress that day if all you do is put out fires it's going to be really hard to make real long-term progress you might make some progress but long-term progress and and so as I think about like these these difficult years of trying to get your business into a more structured, routinized process of sales and marketing and everything you know everything's more structured you know how do you how do you think about you know the challenges that you'll face and I want to get into scaling here in a second but I'm just talking about like the how do you think about as a leader about the fires about the buckets about all the different tasks you could be doing and how do you sort through what you don't do and what you do if that makes sense now it does and this is the job by the way of the CEO of the business owner your primary job if you're the CEO business owner period the one thing that you have to do is to figure out what your company's right next thing is like that's it people talk all day long about how the role of the CEO is to set the vision they're all the CEOs to hire train and retain the best they're all the CEOs to make sure the zone is cash yeah every single one of those is going to be downstream from identifying what is the single greatest constraint in the business today and surging resources to that one constraint and what this means is that as a business owner as a leader in a company or really any organization the very first thing that you have to come to grips with is that all of these dumpster fires burning around you some of them just need to burn for a little bit longer and you be okay with it. That's so hard. That's so hard. You know what you know what taught me this what what maybe finally come from with this and when I realized this was yeah I've got four kids and they're all two years apart and so there was a time in our home you know now my kids are 14 16 18 and 20 they generally clean up after themselves and you know yeah not house at all then they're definitely but there was a time when our house was just always messy yeah always and my wife and I actually quite clean people were not orders like we clean it like and yet they was always messy it that you came over it was messy we cleaned it up it was messy and I think anybody who has small kids in the house you just at some point are gonna have to come to grips with the fact that it's going to be AI and it's just a part of life. If you don't you're gonna drive yourself and your family crazy that it's the same way with business you just have to come to grips with the fact that you can't fix everything all at once and if you try to what you're going to have is what we call about your half built ridges so you're gonna just start building one and then move on to the next and half built ridges worth exactly nothing. Yeah so how do you figure out what that right next thing is like this is the big question that you need to solve for as a business owner and there's some tactical things that we can get into but at its core all business only ever has two problems you either have a problem of demand or you have a problem of supply okay so demand is I just don't have enough leads or customers yeah we need more leads and customers we need more sales we need more revenue yeah supply is please don't give me any more leads and customers we can't fulfill the ones that we have right right and the thing about it is it always switches back and forth between those two yeah you figure out sales and marketing you got a supply problem yeah increase supply you got a demand problem and you want this to happen because that's called growth so what you need to ask yourself right now is of your problems that you have what's the big one like what's the main thing we want to address first do you primarily have a supply problem or do you primarily have a demand problem so we're going to start from there and then you know if it's a demand problem it's okay is it a top of funnel general awareness nobody knows who we are yeah or is it people know who we are we're not converting them and you can start to now begin to drill down to where the actual problem is but this is the job the job is to figure out what the problem is and this is important I want everybody out there who's running a business to hear this it is not your job once you've identified the problem to solve it yourself right right I've all of you of that need in that responsibility because at scale you won't be able to hurt the expression you know give a man a fish a fish feeding for a day teaching to fish feeding for a lifetime no it's cute I love it the reality is when you're starving to death you just need somebody to give you a freaking fish and so what you want to do when you figured out the fish that you need the next thing you figure out is who's already caught this fish how can I have them give me a fish they caught and while I'm eating it they can tell me how they caught it yeah and so so much if it does come down to the network that you're in I mean that's why what what you're building with the business makers network is so important because we think as business owners that okay I got to figure it out you don't and you shouldn't it'll take too long it's already been figured out so figure out who figured it out and go talk to them and if you don't know who them is then that's what you got to figure out is where are them and they're always around like there's nothing new under the sun in terms of the business problem right so but that that's usually where we start is an advanced problem a supply problem eventually we want to build you know data scorecards things like that in organizations where they become apparent early and we can just read yellow green it's kind of tough but for now just start there and I bet you're going to gain some clarity you mentioned something interesting in your talk you were just talking about kind of the kind of employees in the kind of way you think about building the employees in a company a lot of people think that you know they need to hire top talent or what they might think is top talent or they need to hire that kind of home run employee but you you're also just saying you need to think that way that you can find all these home run employees you need to be able to hire basically a good group of people who can get the job done you aren't looking for superstars and I don't even think those things necessarily it's not either or in some sense or we're thinking or we're just thinking wrongly about employees but you want to elaborate especially you know someone who's got let's say a tenant employee company and so every employee is really I mean it could it could destroy that next boy could do great for the company or destroy the company you're very small and in every move you make you could have great consequences or challenging consequences how do you think about like building and hiring employees kind of in these early stages yeah one of the my core beliefs is my goal is not to build a team of a players my goal is to build a company that doesn't require them and that's because well it's a couple reasons number one when you are first getting started when you're this 10 person company you're not an a player company you're just not yet you're kind of messed up and so this idea that oh I just need to go and hire a bunch of a players which you hear all the time if you're a business owner that's what you hear oh you just you just you just need to go hire better people do that I hate that because it's fortune cookie wisdom right it's one of those things well yet it's true it's just unhelpful how do I do that right and and the answer is the way that you hire a players is you become the kind of company that a player's want to work for because a players have options yeah so the goal isn't just like let's go and find the people because one it's unhelpful also the thing about a players is they leave because they have options yeah and I remember the very first time I'd finally built what I thought was this amazing executive team and things were humming along and then in the same week I had two of my four executive leaders quit to take different jobs yeah and I just was crushed so I'm like I thought I finally had it and they left and I was really upset I'm like how could they be so disloyal that's nonsense it's not loyalty this isn't family this is a team just like I'd make a roster move if they were terrible they made a roster move because they had a bigger better deal somewhere else so we don't solve for people first right we solve for systems first because good people don't fix broken systems broken systems break good people yeah and simultaneously good systems can transform a B or even a C player into an A player also if you have good systems and you have a well-oiled machine that's the kind of company that a players want to come and work for and they wind up elevating your systems even more so if you can focus on how do we have the best systems in here how do we have systems that are so good that chucklehead McGee could run this thing and get phenomenal results yeah if you just put the responsibility on you to do this as the business owner and look if you don't know how to do it again now that's your job who knows how to do it who caught this fish how can I buy their system bar their system have them explain their system to me and then we have the system now we bring the people into run the systems it's helpful breaking down the supply demand idea I think it was a what's his name they call the profit he's a TV guy he constantly talks about people product process oh is that market slowness yeah I think that's right yeah people product process I find those categories also helpful yeah because you know you got your product and then you got your people and then you know your process let's talk about like as we think about kind of these two to eight million dollar companies what are let's say the top three places where you're going to find the most success when it comes to trying to scale so the very first thing that you need to do as a business owner is you have to visualize and document how customers happen in your business and what you do with them once you have yeah there is so much value and just having a visual flowchart of okay people find out about us how does that happen well we run ads and then just being able to visualize in flowchart form yeah this is called business process mapping value chain mapping we call it value engine mapping you can google this if you get an MBA which I don't have you might even take a class on this this is something that really big companies do but little companies don't and it's one of the reasons little companies stay little you cannot optimize until you visualize and it's the reason that we're fixing things that aren't even broken and and we're adding things to our processes when we don't need to add new we need to unblock existing but you don't know that because very often we don't even know how our business works at a certain point it just gets so complicated I had this experience in 2006 I remember I was at a business conference actually I was sitting in a bar and I went to go pay my bar tab and my credit card was declined and I tried another one it was declined I tried another one it was declined I checked my bank account it was at zero I looked at my line of credit I had no more line of credit on a $250,000 line of credit I realized sitting at that bar in Dallas Texas that I was $336,000 in debt I didn't even realize it yeah and I was sitting about to cry and I'm like I don't even I don't know how to fix it because I don't even know what's wrong and I remember the conversation I had with a buddy where we were talking about how and interesting how all these business ideas were just formed on the back of a napkin about like Southwest Airlines and these things and I remember looking up and there was a stack of cocktail napkins of course it was bar and I grabbed one of them and I just like if I can describe how my business works on this napkin then maybe I have a business and if I can't then I'm probably just going to figure out how to declare bankruptcy and get my own job back or so I don't know can pass them my wife when I've done it bare minimum yeah that's what I did but I I set there and I did that on a single napkin I drew out how customers happen in my business we run ads to a lead form the people that opt in we make this upsell to them the people that don't we do this follow up and it was the simplest thing in the world but when I looked at it I was like that's it most of our businesses are the same way they are simple enough that we really could map them out on an napkin if we tried yeah we've made them so complicated so the biggest thing that you can do to scale your business is just to figure out how your business works then if you will look step by step stage by stage and say okay how do we know this one is working how do we know this step of the process is working and you'll assign metrics to each one of those steps and track those metrics so that now you have actually data on how customers are flowing through your business that's that's the customer journey yeah yeah and you know where they're getting stuck so you can identify where the constraint is where the bottleneck is now all you're ever trying to do is say where's the bottleneck it's over here you fix that one and move somewhere else and that concept is called theory of constraints I didn't come up with it but that's all we do where's the bottleneck you fix it it moves somewhere else you fix it again and as we are continuing to add capacity businesses have a way of scaling yeah one thing at a time no one thing at a time I'm a I'm actually just going to get some free consulting out of you yeah let's do it I'm gonna ask you actually about business makers yeah so business makers one of this is our last year this is our first year we we got over just barely over 100 members like 102 or 103 members whatever the first year was probably we just ended the first year April 1st so that was literally our public launch date was April 1st last year and there's the need that I that I recognize actually came out of 2020 when I saw a lot of other Christian networks kind of compromise or at least not stand up against the little government tyranny that we're dealing with I had friends from c12 call me and say hey look do they ask me literally if I had a business network in 2020 because they're you know CEO group all their businesses were sending their people home or requiring mask at work all these things and these CEOs that were calling me were like we aren't gonna do that we're gonna fight the tyranny or we're just getting north the tyranny and we're gonna make sure mom and dad can have work and provide for their family and not deal with this self inflicted problem that we're creating we want to fight against it and so they were getting no encouragement from their groups and then if you and then related you think about this like c12 faith driven entrepreneur convene you know I mean there's probably something I don't know 5,000 members between all three of those groups or something like that but if they alone would have stood up against the tyranny that was going on I mean the economy probably wouldn't have kind of shut down as much if you just you know a little courage begets courage is the principle a little bit of faithfulness and standing up against government tyranny goes a long ways you know same thing for the church if if a lot of the churches didn't shut down I think the covid would have been totally different and handled totally different and the government would have stopped telling the churches how to worship but so that was kind of the first thing I realized was like me and these these networks you join a network because there's help there and especially when times are difficult I'm I'm I'll join a network when times are good but because you know I want relationships and I want a network and you know it's a positive experience but I'm also there because it's it's gonna be a difficult you know when times are bad I'm gonna have my people these people that are I know can really help me around so I was kind of the con that was kind of the the seed that was playing in my mind in 2020 but then over time I realized there's two other things going on one was no network uses their combined efforts for political influence and so I saw that basically God gives authority to leaders that's just what it means to be a leader you got you got authority and God gives power authority influence and often money to business leaders now for whatever reason Christian business leaders have opted not to use their influence for political purposes but Elon Musk does Bill Gates does all these unbelieving business leaders absolutely do but for some reason we've been taught in the church that hey you need to separate your faith from politics and all this kind of kind of funny stuff and so we and and when your mayor will listen to you more than Bob down the street because you manage you know 200 million dollars in revenue or you manage 50 employees in your city or you you know it's like the the the mayor's gonna listen to you more the governor's gonna listen to you more because you just have more power influence in authority and the other I think thing that's kind of the other thing identified here so the politics issue identified the other thing identified here was all these networks didn't have a whole economy in it so C12 works with C-suite people which is fine it's I understand the business model it's a focused business model and there's a lot to be in focus we all know that you know a feature of an entrepreneur serves entrepreneurs I wanted to build business makers network where there's the whole economy in there you know from employees all the way to C-suite individuals so not I would say and we got tears for each one so you got focus kind of marketing tears for each one but you don't have that same kind of overall focus that you'd have if you're just going after C-suite or just going after entrepreneur so there's there's a challenge there but but in the long run I think it's the right thing to do because you know if I'm if I need a sales guy in California I'm first going to go to my Christian network where I know people are aligned missionally spiritually and you know economically in the vision that they have for their their job their career their church their family their city and so forth so so that was kind of some of the problems that I was trying to solve now the challenges especially the first year in multiple conversations you know it's it's very the first year was very um hands on and trying to get the sell like you call your friend and say hey join a network when there's only five people in the network yeah pay me twenty five hundred bucks when there's only ten people in the network or whatever it's like it's super it's the hardest sell you ever make because you're selling a network that's not there yet and so you're more selling a vision and part of that sell is like please trust me I'll get you I'll get us there you know um so the first year was really difficult um and I kind of find it like a dating app a little bit it's it's it's like you need the right men and women in there you know you you want the right amount of people in there to kind of create that momentum so I think you probably can you identify all the all the challenges that I'm trying to describe here in this now when you look at demand and supply and break down that you know um we're kind of having to create our own demand but the demand is the supply in one sense too does that make sense the supply is the network yeah yeah yeah so the supply is actually how many people in the network really because it's a membership kind of network process um so with with with love just you know pick apart use use your framework to kind of pick apart you know where we're at how we can scale um and I bet this will apply to a lot of businesses and people are listening right now practically speaking yeah there's there's lots of different business models and all business models have their own advantages and disadvantages so the they're their business models that are more service-based that are phenomenal because what you can do is you can sell it to one person you can deliver it to that one person and you don't deliver it until you're paid and so this is a really phenomenal business model for cash flow but it could be challenging for scale and you don't necessarily have any sort of network effects right now what what you're talking about is more of a marketplace type model where it is tough to get started I mean it's it's like that you know when the facts machine first came out it's incredibly worthless if there's just one yeah that's right and it only got you better when they were actually needed that's right yeah it only got I mean I mean I am dating myself at this point but that's right that's right this is how these things work right any social network type thing is only as valuable as the people who are in it but it's this chicken and egg because nobody wants to be there until people are there and and so that's right but the nice thing is about these types of businesses is once they get going unlike a business that's valuable if there's just one customer it starts to build its own momentum yeah let's know I just want to point that out because there is no perfect business model and and all too often business owners will look at their model and say oh you know I'm in services I really wish I were any commerce and the person who's any commerce selling products is thinking who has a boat floating off the shore at Long Beach because they can't bring in right now because a tariff's sir because of a long-term insurrect right they're thinking I wish I just had a service business right and so it's there is no perfect business model but understanding how your business works and what's required to get it going and and figuring out where's the hard because all businesses have a hard and so the question is are you equipped and willing to deal with the hard so your hard is just that your hard is we've got to get people into a group when nobody wants to be in a group until people are in the group now the thing that you have going for you is you own media so what we're doing right now you have an audience and so you can stand up and say hey everybody I'm doing this thing here's what it's all about you should go there and that seeds the group with enough people yeah it's not easy but you've already done what would be the hardest part for just a civilian yeah to go and do if they're thinking of doing this the first time now what it's about is okay how do we get these 100 people and get 100 people to turn into 500 to thousand you know 10,000 and so on which is which is a different problem right at its core now what it comes down to is a brand and and I'm going to define brand here because brand is not your logo yeah that's right that's right brand is what people say about you when you're not there and ideally that they are saying something about you and one of the biggest mistakes that businesses make is they have no brand because they have no soul because there's nothing to say about them yeah you in just what you articulated in terms of these are three things that make what we're doing unique that's the biggest part of it because now if that's been explained to other people they can say you should be in this group because here's where it's different and the most important choice you will ever make in your business is the choice of who you serve the choice in your ideal client and so being crystal clear on who that is and so that's kind of the first tactical thing you want to do who is it that you serve and you want to be narrow especially in the beginning on this and everybody wants to say oh but my business could serve anybody my product can work for anybody and so they want to talk to everybody because they're afraid that if they limit who they talk to that they're going to talk to fewer people the exact opposite is true if you attempt if you attempt to talk to everybody you're going to talk to nobody because you're noise yeah that's right but if you come out there and say this is specifically who we serve and this is how we do it and I'm talking only to you now all of those people hear you and you're no longer noise or signal now the second most important choice that you will make is your choice in an enemy and this is the other thing a lot of businesses are scared to do they're afraid to have a unique point of view that just might piss somebody else off but today especially if you want to break through the noise you must have something unique to say and I don't care if you're starting a business network a software as a service or a plumbing company yeah you must have a unique point of view are you familiar with buckies oh yeah oh yeah of course everybody knows buckies why it's a gas station right it's a gas but what did buckies do buckies said we believe when you pull up to a gas station there should always be a pump available and the bathroom should always be clean yeah period yeah and they're going to double down on that why because when you walked into you know on a long road trip you try to find gas half the time the pumps are full and a hundred percent of every time the bathrooms are disgusting yeah right and so it starts with planting a flag and saying this is what we're about and this is who we are violently opposed to so at my company the scalable company we're very clear on who we serve right you know like between two and eight million that's it if you're less than that we're probably not for you if you're a fortune five hundred we're probably not for you yeah and so that that's important but now what you also need to do is you need to help your people throw rocks at your collective enemies and we do this by empowering them with the words and the and the phrases to go and do this a company that's been doing this forever is apple yeah apple has always been against the clones like I don't know if you remember the original 1984 ad that ran during the Super Bowl if not go look forward on YouTube it was directed by Ridley Scott it only ran once and in that ad that ran in 1984 you see the seeds of the apple brand that still exists today interesting they've always been selling us our own individuality and they've always always been giving us tools to be individuals yeah and so being crystal clear on that having something to say is essential now the next piece that you need to add to this is that spokesperson who is going to be the worthy guide right now today it is harder than ever to break through the noise and we I'll let the economists argue over whether or not we're in a recession I don't I never care because I don't believe them anyway we're either going to opt in or opt out on that on our own I do believe we're in a trust recession yeah oh yeah all the reasons that you talked about back in 2020 trust is at an all-time low there is one thing that according to the study that Pricewaterhouse Coopers did G2 and Forbes did it as well that consumers have said will increase trust with their trust in a brand and that one thing is if the founder if the executives of a company and ideally the founder CEO is active on social media uh interesting and this man is I hate this because I am in this for the money I say that kind of jokingly but like I don't want to be famous yeah oh yeah yeah now I know plenty of people who do they want to be influencers and all this kind of stuff that is not me right I I like I value my privacy I don't want to do it but I've realized over the last couple of years I don't have a choice and I think if you're out there running a business today your highest and best use to your company outside of figuring out what the company's right next thing is what's the biggest constraint that needs to be is to be the spokesperson for your brand yeah to be the person out there on the front lines speaking your unique point of view throwing rocks at your enemies yeah that is how they find and you know and rally around and it's how you also teach your people to talk about you there's one marketing channel that gets better at scale every other marketing channel you want to buy ads the more you spend the poor it's going to perform every time right you and expand your sales force they're it's always gonna have degradation the one that gets better at scale is word of mouth yeah yeah so how do we engineer word of mouth we have to have something unique to say and we have to teach our people our biggest advocates how to say it everything else beyond that is kind of tactical yeah right but that core like having a phenomenal offer that people actually want to buy being clear on who it is that you serve and having a worthy spokesperson who's out there championing the message this is the core of of any sales and marketing effort today yeah that's really good Ryan did you were you there when Brett Craig spoke at our conference on Thursday do you have you made it there by the time I made it right as he was speaking yeah and he went through yeah he was fantastic and one of the things I appreciated about him was just kind of he was a very good I mean like his presentation is all about show and tell yeah it's like how to do it but like so and tell is really good just talking about and he's the he's the guy who created a Dr. Pepper fan duel ad set Taco Bell he helped Taco Bell get into compete with breakfast with McDonald's just really interesting and and and he the thing I like about him was like he was the two principles I walk away there two or two narratives that I walk away with as one is find something to push against out there yep in your marketing you know so he would push against McDonald's hey Taco Bell has got a better breakfast than McDonald's so he'd push against and then the other thing is you know basically find find a giant to fight yeah you know so he gave the example of XX dash XY clothing XX XY clothing pushed against you know Nike and he showed the picture the the commercial of women in sports telling Nike why don't you defend us why don't you just do it you know because Nike was compitulating to the trends culture and everything really really helpful in kind of thinking through like you know how do you and you want to do this in an honest Christian way and not slander obviously but like he showed honest examples I don't think he was being dishonest when he talked about Nike I mean Nike was on the record not defending women and not defending women against men getting in women's sports you know and of course you can push against like McDonald's in a fun way it wasn't like Taco Bell was trying to slander McDonald's is all they're just kind of in a breakfast war basically is what it was and he gave the example he said after he did a commercial for Taco Bell the McDonald's never really responded the only response McDonald's did when Taco Bell kind of broke into the breakfast world was it tweeted out a picture of Ronald McDonald heading a Chihuahua saying good boy you know like good job you did good you got into the breakfast world good work you know good boy such a great McDonald's response to really fun but I kind of I kind of walked away thinking like okay you know how can you use that in in a world because you're talking about your voice in a world that's so muddled with communication we are the most I mean the communication levels that are at our society even even the communication 30 years ago um you know it's like okay you had mainstream media you had you know maybe an email list at that point could you build an email list 30 years ago I think you could you know yeah that was around about when it started to get possible yeah yeah exactly but the communication was so small now communications all over the place yeah so how do you kind of think about um this you already kind of talked about it a little bit it was like you know use the CEO need to be the voice of your company um but how do you think about this in a very overly communicative kind of stimulated world and um and you know communicate well on about on behalf of your brand in a way that you're actually making a difference think about that for a minute I go one add and then I'm uh you you will let you we'll let you run with it um Dominion wealth strategist let's be clear about something how you handle your money is not a neutral act it's not separate from your walk with Christ it's not exempt from his lordship if you're a Christian which I hope you are then everything you have is under the authority of Jesus and we are commanded to be faithful in all of it Dominion wealth strategist exists to help families think bivocally and act wisely when it comes to financial stewardship they offer education and consulting to help Christians align their household economics with long term Christ center postmanial vision they provide guidance on areas like budgeting saving debt management life insurance estate organizations and developing a multi generational financial vision which is awesome that goes not to sell products it is to help you ask the right question and make informed decisions consistent with your convictions this isn't about chasing wealth for its own sake it's about faithfulness and it's about how Dominion can help you protect the matters and be prepared for the future clarity and conviction that you're sorting through if you're ready to think more intentionally about how you store the resources god hasn't trusted you visit wdb.reform.money that's reformed.money and schedule complimentary consultation today check them out so how are you thinking about this like internet communication world as it regards to kind of what you're just talking about with owning your brain and being the spokesperson it's less about where you communicate and more about what you're saying because ultimately you need to communicate wherever your people are and so if you're a local business then you should probably be active in Facebook even if you think Facebook is like old and funny dutty why because people use Facebook because of Facebook marketplace yeah and so when when people go on Facebook it's usually locally minded so if you're local be there if you're targeting to younger generation you should probably be on tech talk I don't care your feelings about that's where they are yeah so if you want to reach them go where they are it's really that simple where are they go there I don't again I don't care if you like it or not if you don't like it but your people are there then you can't say that you're serious about serving that audience yeah in my opinion again but I got lots of opinions that's the other point that I want to say is you need to have those two opinions so it's less about where you say these things and the specific tactics because they're always changing algorithms are always shifting and things like that what never gets old and what always works is saying something different than what everybody else is saying and you don't have to make it political necessarily because I do get a lot of businesses don't necessarily want to you know enter that you know gap or whatever that's fine you don't have to Chick-fil-A just said we're not going to be open on Sundays yeah right they said you know we're going to make sure that you know they're going to say they're going to we're just having people that are really really kind to you instead of getting yelled at in the drive-through by somebody right and and the here's the secret the trick the hack if you want to make this a little bit easier on you go to Chad Gbt your claw at any of the AI tools and just type in give me a list of all of the kind of best practices and what everybody believes to be true in my industry yeah and then I want you to invert all of them and say which of these now that they're inverted do I still believe yeah so in my business everybody believes that you have to hire a players that the most important thing is who you hire inverted it's not high important all it's like I actually believe that one more we're not going to lie and make this stuff up but very often the opposite of one truth is you know is still true yeah and it like depending on the context and who you're talking to so if I'm a landscaping company right now like I'm alone I might decide you know what we're not going to work on Saturdays because we believe in Saturdays we know you're lawn because we think that you shouldn't have to work on Saturday so we don't make our people work on Saturday and we won't know you're lawn on Saturday because you're probably enjoying your yard on Saturday so we're just not going to do that right now that's a stance that you could take it I still have a dream my wife and I my we have a house in Porto Ranzas Texas like on the beach um and getting like the most basic help out there is impossible like just getting somebody to show up yeah if like you've got a toilet overflowing or like your AC is out is brutal and I think somebody could make money out there just by branding their business will actually show up plumbing yeah will actually and they could probably say you know what we're not that good we're pretty good we're not the cheapest yeah we're pretty expensive but I promise we'll actually show up yeah and if you will just think how can I be different not better better is overrated because better is in the eye of the beholder yeah how can I be different and as long as you're saying something different you're going to stand out if you want to make get attention in a loud room don't yell whisper and so just make a list what is the thing that everybody in your industry especially all your competitors believe to be true everybody's trumpeting all that fortune cookie wisdom invert it do I still believe the opposite and that's the kind of things that you can build a brand around that's what if you are out there communicating people are going to notice that's what you did yeah as you did you said this is crazy everybody's shutting down no no we should be gathering during this time yeah you inverted what was at the at the time common wisdom and that's why you have the brand and platform that you have today yeah the playbook is there yeah how do you how do you think about okay last last question here how do you think about AI in and everything that you're doing especially as applies to scaling you know I still think in some sense AI is like in DOS form some sense yeah kind of like is because you know DOS was a prompt you had to write in you know you had basically describing right now all that stuff in some sense AI is in that same form at this point but how do you think about AI and scaling and and integrating and so forth yeah I mean I think AI is the most powerful tool I've ever seen in my entire career and and so we are right now going through you know I talked earlier about mapping your value flow like creating flow charts around how your business works we're going back to those flow charts and looking at each stage and saying how can we deploy AI to make this more efficient and a better experience for our customers what about this and what about this and what about this one and this is what you as a business needs to be doing today I don't believe that this is something that we should be afraid of I'm I'm I get frustrated and I know there's Christians who will disagree with me on this but I believe that you know it is our job to care for the garden we are not we are micro creators you know in God's image but we cannot create nothing you know something from nothing and so this idea of AI eventually taking over I just have I think has you know biblical problems to it I think it's a tool I think it's a phenomenal tool I think it's I think it's an amazing tool and if you were a lumberjack and you were saying like these chainsaw things are stupid I'm an axe person yeah well you're an idiot okay you're not a very good lumberjack because you're just staying true to the axe so it's going to disrupt a lot of industries there will be job displacements I believe that ultimately this is going to be a boon to the economy just like every other technology has been when it's been introduced right so I'm not scared about it at the same time I've never been more uncertain about the future than I am today yeah but I'm not worried about that because man you don't have to predict the future accurately to benefit from you just have to be looking around when it happens and nobody else is looking around everybody's got their face down on their phones so I mean if you're just looking around as this stuff is happening if you're kind of playing if you're dabbling trying to figure out how to make it work I can promise you you're probably miles ahead of your competition yeah miles ahead of your competition bro no we we are using it integrating it into all of our workflows right now and I would encourage every business to do it but it's not a complete comprehensive no let's put AI in the company you want to go step by step stage by stage with your value creation flow and say how do we AI fight this what about this what about this great yeah agree thank you so much Ryan how do you want people to connect find you what you're doing so I put out all my best stuff totally for free on my youtube channel so if you just want to you know search for me there Ryan dice the ISS you'll find it I'll also publish a weekly newsletter at accidental NBA dot com yeah so there's just some some free stuff they can get yeah thank you so much Ryan for joining us really appreciate your time with cross-paltic 101 everyone Ryan dice make sure you follow him and apparently go to his youtube channel and uh mba accidental mba dot com for masters mba uh and everything so thank you very much Ryan for joining us and uh you guys make sure you guys check out our fight left fees dot com and our conference website never nads going on over there uh go to business makers dot network if you want to find out more what we're doing there very excited about this next year uh we um just the national conference I think really created a lot of momentum for what we're doing there very excited about bringing Christian business leaders together there so uh everyone and tell next week we'll see you later